It's something of novelty to see economists arguing for green taxation, but a policy paper by Professor Michael Jacobs published by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy claims that carbon pricing can help European countries to raise revenue and reduce their fiscal deficits more effectively than other taxes.

The report ‘ Less pain, more gain: the potential of carbon pricing reduce Europe’s fiscal deficits’, published yesterday reviews analysis by Vivid Economics (a London based consultancy) on the potential impact of energy and carbon taxes, as well as changes to the European Union Emissions Trading System, in several Member States, and finds that they could raise as much revenue as other forms of taxation while having less damaging side-effects on economic growth and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Nokia has launched a new versions today of its global maps and navigation app for Apple's iOS devices, called Here maps -built on its Navteq database of locations and traffic reports.

The app uses the same database as Nokia's previous maps product, and is a free download for iPhone and iPad that lets users look up points of interest, calculate routes from their current location (determined by GPS, or triangulation based on Wi-Fi) and see live traffic information.

Limited offline caching of maps, so you can save maps for when there is no connectivity, is also supported.

Like a modern day Howard Hughes, South African born Elon Musk is happy to take on incumbent interests in two industries and think he can win. Having made his fortune from PayPal - defeating the banking industry online - he is now operating along with Boeing as the sole US cargo provider to the Space Station with his project X space programme, and has a brand new Tesla electric vehicle on the market.

Speaking last night at a James Martin School event ' The Future of Energy' and Transport' at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, he was introduced by Professor Ian Goldin - who provided the link as both went to the same high school in Pretoria. Also there were University Vice-Chancellors, the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees and Richard Dawkins.

Elon Musk, the Founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and Chairman of SolarCity, is to give a talk on his experiences at the forefront of technology and innovation The Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street, Oxford, this Wednesday evening.

On 30 August 2012, DfT published a new official statistics release, Local area walking and cycling: England 2010/11. The release included statistics on the prevalence of walking and cycling amongst adults, at local authority level, during 2010/11.

The release was based on data from the Active People Survey, a household survey conducted by telephone with more than 166,000 respondents which is run by Sport England Sport England’s annual Active People Survey.

Having just written about one British company's ambitious plans for with new hard-edged lightweighting developments in sports car engineering using Titanium, and previously other even stiffer applications of Carbon Fibre for weight saving and strength, there's reassuring contrast provided by another UK workshop making, and showing how to make, bicycle frames from bamboo and hemp.

Car makers may wish their vehicles to be a platform for which they maintain control, but they will have a struggle to match the pace of development of device manufacturers in terms of features and usability for the driver. It would be an obvious costs saving to enable a car to be a seamless part of our connected lives, and harder to justify duplicating the functions that consumers want, with custom driver interfaces that may struggle to compete.

According to BMW, the proposed electric scooter can be fully charged in less than three hours and has a range of up to 100 kilometres. The e-scooter has storage capacity in its the battery of 8 kWh, claimed as the best level among e-scooters. The battery is charged via the integrated charging device, either at a regular household socket or a charging station.

With the London 2012 Olympic Games opening in just 16 days time, for my first blog post for Transport KTN, I thought I’d ease myself in with a discussion about rowing.

Bear with me. This, and cycling, is perhaps Britain’s most successful Olympic sport in recent Games. I’ll be stretching sporting metaphors quite a bit for a transport blog, but the flinging about of links in values and performance between Olympians and big business, looks set to be in open season from here on in.